NT imprisonment rate reaches new high

Justice advocates in the Northern Territory say a new high in the average daily imprisonment rate shows the government has no alternatives to jail for criminals committing minor offences.

Figures released last week by the Australian Bureau of Statistics for the March quarter show that for the first time, the NT's imprisonment rate has passed 900 people per 100,000, said the North Australian Aboriginal Justice Agency.

CEO Priscilla Collins said that since last March the NT has recorded the largest increase in imprisonments in the country.

The national rate is 194 people per 100,000, but in the NT it is 904 per 100,000.

Western Australia had the second-highest imprisonment rate of 273 per 100,000.

Ms Collins accused the NT government of "going for broke" with skyrocketing incarceration rates.

She is calling on the government to invest in alternatives to prison, such as diversion, rehabilitation and therapeutic programs, and justice reinvestment.

"If you're looking at over 60 per cent of people in jail are there for six months or less, they're on minor offences, look at alternatives."

Ms Collins said the community did not understand that jailing more people did not improve safety.

"That person is going to come out of jail, they're not going to be rehabilitated, they're still going to have the same issues," she said.

"Until you address why people come into contact with the criminal justice system, you're not going to break that cycle."

It costs more than $100,000 per year to keep an adult prisoner in jail, and about double that for a juvenile.

"That's coming out of taxpayers' money; that money could be diverted to more hospitals, more education, more training, more employment, rather than just locking them up," Ms Collins said.

Corrections Minister John Elferink said the high prison population was "part of protecting territory citizens from each other".

There is an over-representation of welfare-dependent and unemployed people within NT prisons, he said, and blamed the federal government for spending millions of dollars in the NT each fortnight on welfare "so that we as a territory government can spend millions of dollars every fortnight cleaning up the mess".

He said he was lobbying his federal counterparts to review the welfare system "so that passive welfare assists those that need to be assisted and doesn't fund lifestyles which lead to criminality".